The Italian Adventure of Kratos and Rogue
by grandpazero
Summary: Concerning a runaway from Jerusalem and a Spartan survivor of a shipwreck.


**1. Castaways**  
A young woman wanders north on the peninsula of Italy. She calls herself Rogue, because she is a criminal, but youth and inexperience dictate she is not a very famous or accomplished criminal. (1)

But Rogue did not have to be a very great thief to get into a lot of trouble at home, trouble with the aunt who raised her, the priests of the Temple of Solomon, and the Persian guards in Jerusalem. For Rogue (not her given name) is a child of the tribe of Judah, born only a generation after the Temple was rebuilt with the permission of the Zoroastrian Emperor of Persia, Cyrus the Great. The laws of Judah are strict, and the power of Persia cannot be challenged, and a woman child is expected to follow all the rules of religion and empire.

Rogue, however, was poisoned by some new, strange ideas, wearing the cloak of older mysticisms that still lingered among the Israelites. The exclusive fealty to YHWH preached by Ezekial to the tribe of Judah in Babylon is the official religion of Jerusalem, but among the women of the tribes who did not share the exile in Babylon there are worshippers of older, less jealous dieties. There are those who speak in secret of the gains that might be had by rejecting the law of Yahweh (as we call the God of Judah today), and one of those mischievous gods caused the young woman's breath to quicken whenever she had the chance to lie, cheat, or steal.

Opportunity was rare, no one was at hand to teach her, and Jerusalem was a rumor-filled, tight knit community full of gossip and patronage. Early on Rogue regularly disguised herself as a boy, and her pilfering was usually limited to a piece of fruit or old clothing. Even though her family was a single aunt, there were neighbors. So when Rogue finally went for the thrill of "devil made me do it" anarchy and stole from the vendors outside the Temple, the city guards asked questions and followed rumors to a likely suspect.

If she had been an ordinary girl, Rogue's career would have ended then. But wandering the streets disguised as a boy had led to countless mock combats, and the possession of several substantial knives. Rogue was strong and fast, and she killed the city guard who came to take her into custody for what certainly would have been harsh interrogation. Fame is an odd thing, and a young parentless woman who kills an adult soldier attracts the interest of many. Enough interest so that Rogue left Jerusalem immediately.

How she survived exile and arrived on the southern shores of Italy is a dreary tale of near starvation, constant stress, and barely maintained disguises. (2) Eventually she followed the shore to the Spartan colony of Tarentum on the heel of the boot of the Italian peninsula, and then north along the Adriatic coast.

It was well for Rogue that she had rejected Yahweh, and believed that she deserved the challenge of, and the eventual rewards from some other more interesting and evil god. If she had been true to Yahweh the isolation and loneliness would have led to inaction and suicide. The sectarian communities of the greater Greek world, under threat from the army of Xerxes in the east and the navies of Carthage in the west, were uniformly hostile to a ragged vagabond. When she found company, it was with thieves, refugees, and runaway slaves from the new cities on the west coast of Italy to the north. The Greeks were not as tolerant of strangers as the Persians, and vagabonds were of questionable character. So Rogue continued traveling from Tarentum, scavaging along the shore, and stealing trash from isolated fishing camps.

Just by chance a ship traveling from Sparta to the colony of Tarentum was driven north by bad weather, and wrecked on the Adriatic coast of Italy.

Rogue finds the young shipwrecked Spartan Kratos (3) , and poses as his friend. She needs some sort of companion, and Kratos appears as a gift from the gods. Along these shores a pair of castaways will receive a much friendlier welcome than a solitary vagabond. Rogue recovers some clothing from the shipwreck, and takes on the disguise of a Greek sailer. She has enough skill to appear to be a young man even to the Spartan. Rogue is rather intelligent, and Kratos is a rather ordinary young man, denied any education outside his _Ageles_.

Rogue must council the Spartan. He is profoundly depressed, speaking of his drowned comrades as if he had lost his family. Which, of course, was exactly the situation, for the Spartan infantry squad, the _syssitia_, was a Spartan's family until he was in his thirties.

Rogue is smart enough not to point out that Kratos is still alive, and needs to keep himself busy. She leads by example, fetching debris from the surf, and hauling bodies from the ocean. She calls to the Spartan for assistance, and asks questions about the dead and their lost possessions. As the young warrior starts moving about, his spirits rise. Rogue asks him about the storm, the voyage, and the destination, and with little effort learns that Kratos has no knowledge of geography, the location of Tarentum, or the coastline of Italy.

After two days of salvage and funerals, Rogue leads him away from the coast into the mountains, to an adventure among the warring tribes of central Italy. It begins when they encounter the sole survivor of a small hunting party that was attacked by a Harpy. The monster has made its lair in the largest mountain of the Appenines, where one of the tribes long ago built a temple. Tracking down the Harpy will lead them into the underground remains of the ancient temple.

The hunter is staggering through the woods. He is unkempt, without weapons or food, speaking to himself, and unaware of Rogue and Kratos until they lay hands upon him. Alone, Rogue would have avoided any contact with the man, who appears crazed, and seems not to have any possessions worth stealing.

With much prompting they get a coherent tale from the survivor. His tongue is a dialect of Veneti, but he also speaks some Greek. Rogue has heard Veneti in Italian refugee camps, enough words so that she can ask questions and, with a few questions repeated in Greek, understand the survivor's rantings.

There were five hunters, daring an inland plateau to hunt mountain sheep, Abruzzo chamois with valuable hides. It was, however, a place with a sinister reputation, where no one had hunted for many decades.

"We had only been encamped four days when she came," the man told them. "We should have known. The sheep were hiding from her beneath the trees. Awful. Her screams in the air. A fell voice I could not bear." The hunter begins to repeat himself, complaining about the cries of the evil monster. "I could not bear it, I could not bear it."

Rogue translates a bit for Kratos as the poor man babbles, then slaps the fellow and continues questioning. Kratos is following pretty well, the word for Harpy is borrowed from the Greek.

"She sat in a tree, on a great dead branch. We could all see her, and took up our bows. But her screams were beyond bearing." Once again the poor survivor starts repeating himself. Rogue slaps him again.

The hunter looks at the Hebrew and the Spartan, as if seeing them for the first time. There are tears in his eyes, and he tries a few words in Greek. "I had to hide," he sobs, "and I shouted for them, but they were ensorcelled by her cries.

"Marius and the others, his brother," the man's eyes bulge, and he claws at Rogue. He lapses back into his native tongue. "They walked right up to her. She beat them, their heads split. She tore their bodies, and ate pieces of their flesh.

"I could not bear her cries. I had to flee before she saw me, into the bushes." Now the man's eyes gaze off into memory, his arms still, and he starts repeating himself again.

Kratos knows the man is lost, that the gods have taken him. Between a sentence in Greek, the word "Harpy," and a few words of translation, the Spartan comprehends the survivor's circumstance. Leaving his comrades to their fate has unmanned him, and his suffering had just begun. Kratos understands the loss, but he cannot understand deserting comrades confronted by such a monster. The hunter is a coward, a deviant that no Spartan would tolerate. Kratos grabs the survivor, and bruskly asks for directions to the hunting camp in Greek, and then asks no other questions. "Leave him," he advises Rogue.

The trail the survivor had left was plain enough, for the weather had been mild the last two days. They find the hunters' camp on the high plain, and examine the scene. The flying monster had torn the hunters apart beneath a large tree close to their hunting camp, and rummaged through their shelter. At the murder site violence had scattered torn clothing and broken weapons, but in the camp the Harpy had methodically searched the Venetis' belongings.

Rogue noticed a purse torn open, but the looter had dropped the copper coins on the ground.

They salvage supplies from the camp, gratefully some honey, dried fruit, and meat, and usefully some arrows. Rogue tests the small hunting bows, and finds one to her liking, better made than the poor stick she had stolen from some other vagabond. A hundred feet from the camp they find several pounds of honeycomb visited by small animals and a cloud of insects. Amid their supplies the hunters had fashioned candles from the beeswax, shallow earthenware bowls with short wicks.

Farther from the camp was a site for butchery, where several hides are spread out to cure.

Kratos is silent. When they finish the rounds of the Veneti encampment and return to the scene of the killings he kneels on the ground over the dismembered remnants of one of the hunters. The young Spartan holds his spear upright in his left hand, the butt spike in the bloody soil, and leans his forehead against the shaft. He has set aside his shield and helmet, and rolls a ball of beeswax in his fingers, a ball of wax he has placed in his right ear two or three times. "I should kill it."

Rogue is testing a light short sword for damage. The monster had torn a medallian or a gemstone from the hilt, but the narrow blade is undamaged. "You know about them, Harpies?" she asks. "Can beeswax protect you from her spell?"

Several seconds pass. Kratos does not look up, and Rogue is worried. She continues.

"It is dangerous, if she spots you she can drop stones." Now Kratos looks up at her, with an expression both calm and deadly. Death in combat, something the Veneti survivor had fled, the thought echoes in Rogue's ears, though the Spartan shipwreck survivor does not speak aloud.

Rogue is excited, though she shows only concern and curiosity. The Harpy had obviously taken souvenirs back to its lair. "You must be careful, even if she cannot ensnare you. Find her lair, a cavern or a stone fall, up there.

"Look," the supposed sailor continues, "I will go with you, if we are cautious. The mountains are no place to travel alone, not now. Two pair of eyes. We will find out where she roosts, and trap her in the rocks, where she cannot fly, or make an ambush."

Kratos narrows his eyes, but shrugs. Rogue is certain that the young man intended to challenge the flying monster out in the open. After moment he nods his head.

"Your robe, too easy for her to spot. Take one from the camp. It was ruined by the sea, in any case." (4)

They proceed cautiously on to the west, toward the mountain peaks in the distance, the spine of the peninsula of Italy. Retelling a story of Odysseus, Kratos prepares beeswax earplugs for both of them to protect against the hypnotizing song of the flying monster. During the day they travel slowly, and Rogue constantly worries about camouflage and looks for places to hide. The first night there is three hours of waning moonlight, but each night the crescent moon is smaller, and closer to the rising sun at their backs.

They spot many large birds flying around a great granite mountain. At a distance they can see that one of the fliers is a giant, and that the smaller birds scatter from it. Continuing their cautious approach over several days, they find eventually find the Harpy's lair, deep in a gorge on the side of the mountain, often marked by a column of vultures. They discern the habits of the monster. It emerges from a small and inconspicuous cave when the sunlight provides warmth in the morning. After sunning (and sometimes bathing in a spring far below) the Harpy flies off for the day. It returns in the afternoon, at various times, with occasional prey, or pieces of prey in its claws. The mountain sheep are a favored meal.

A few large dressed stones can be seen buried in the scree below the cave, as if an isolated mountain temple once stood on the steep slope, a building that has collapsed.

During the morning, always well before noon, one or more of the vultures will land outside the cave, and sometimes make a short foray into the Harpy's lair to fetch out a fresh bone.

Rogue and Kratos sneak into the Harpy's cave during the day, down a short entrance tunnel, and find an abatoir, a slaughterhouse. The Harpy rarely cleans up the remains of her meals. But there are some interesting things amid the larger bones that the vultures dared not drag out. The Harpy once had two companions whose remains show they were killed more than fifty years ago by some Greek warriors, warriors whose partial skeletons are concentrated at the end of the entrance tunnel, mixed with the bones of the two Harpies they managed to kill. Amid the ruined remains of those warriors Rogue and Kratos find a marvelous javelin, a weapon that appears untouched by the ravages of time or use. It is still gripped by the bones of a human hand, but the skeletal hand falls apart when Kratos takes up the weapon.

Led by the observant Rogue, they inspect the cave carefully, spending at least three hours, finding great treasure, and finding a secret passage that leads deeper into the mountain. The Harpy lives in one of two underground rooms of an ancient temple, rooms that were once a natural cave, but underground chambers greatly modified by stone cutters. The rooms are divided by a dressed stone wall. In the front room there are four tall stone blocks, plinths that certainly held statues of the gods for secret ceremonies underground. One of the plinths has obviously been used as a perch for the Harpy.

In the front room of the Harpy's lair, in addition to the remains of the Harpy's companions, the adventurers who killed them, and the bones of her meals, there are about a thousand small pieces of gold and three gemstones: a large emerald, a golden yellow topaz, and a moonstone. The gemstones and a handful of gold coins are lying on top of one of the plinths, certainly the roost of the surviving Harpy. Kratos and Rogue only burden themselves with a couple of pounds of the treasure, the gemstones and fifty gold pieces.

Rogue is careful to hide her excitement about the treasure from the Spartan. She speaks of the monster, and the chances of killing it if they stay in the Harpy's lair. Kratos says nothing, but shrugs as if to say a fight with the flying monster is only to be expected.

In the back room there are six recesses cut into the walls. The two recesses facing the door through the dressed stone wall are deep and outfitted with stone thrones. The other four recesses, two on either side of the room, are shallow and once were painted with figures. But some two hundred years of neglect has erased the paint. Rogue takes her time and carefully inspects the room. She finds the stonework mechanism to open the secret stairs beneath the right-hand stone throne. (5)

The secret stairs descend about twenty feet into a long dark passage about five feet wide, and seven feet high. For a hundred feet beside the passage there are the parts of the stone mechanism that slides the throne open and closed over the steep stairs. Kratos lifts the counterweight to close the opening, and Rogue jambs the mechanism to prevent it opening, even though she is certain that the monster has never found the secret passage. Rogue has heard of this sort of stonework machinery from thieves in Egypt, who tell tales of treasure beneath stone monuments and desert mountains.

Kratos is worried about being underground and getting lost. Though he says nothing to his chance companion, he knows that this passage carved into the granite is the secret portion of some ancient temple. Back home on the Peloponnesian peninsula he has seen a hundred priests enter a tiny temple and descend to hidden caverns below, and the Spartan imagines they will find twists and turns, and dozens of rooms and side passages. But they encounter nothing of the sort.

There are no turns or side passages in the long trek to the center of the mountain. A gutter is carved into the floor, a small square trench to carry away the water that occasionally seeps into the carved tunnel from cracks in the massif. The two adventurers follow the long dark passage for six hours to the center of the great granite mountain, where the passage suddenly opens out into a large chamber. On one side of the room there is a stair that ascends to the highest peak. At the far end of the chamber the long dark passage continues, appearing as an open door in the far wall.

They decide to climb the staircase before proceeding further on the straight passage. The stairs ascend in a spiral through the the mountain, and at the peak there is an ancient altar, a small stone room high above the other mountains. They can see the night sky outside, clear above whatever mists and clouds might be below. At the four cardinal points of the small stone room there are large openings, in appearance like oversized windows. These openings lead out to cliffs of different heights, the cliffs that are the mountain's pinnacle.

They do not stay on the peak of the mountain. It is cold and dark, they cannot see down the sides of the mountain, and they worry about the flying Harpy. Descending to the large room they rest for a while, taking turns to listen in the dark. After they each have had a few hours of sleep, the two adventurers decide to proceed down the passage, as it continues on to what they assume is the west, and a possible way entirely through the mountain.

Water continues to accumulate into the small trench in the center of the floor. From the flow of the water it is obvious that the passage through the mountain is descending. It takes another six hours to reach a second large room.

The large rooms that interrupt the passage through the mountain are each sixty feet wide and one hundred and twenty feet long, with arched ceilings thirty feet high. Discussing the layout of these underground portions of an ancient temple, Rogue points out that the Harpy's lair was the same size, though it had a dividing wall of dressed stone.

Kratos and Rogue will eventually find a total of four such rooms of identical size and shape interrupting the long dark passage. In the first of these chambers they found the staircase to the ancient altar at the top of the mountain.

In this second chamber, now a twelve hour walk from the Harpy's lair, there is a cave-in that opens a natural chimney to the sky. Though the chimney is irregular, light filters down and provides faint illumination during the day. Close to the door-like opening where Kratos and Rogue enter the room there is a pile of granite rocks from the cave-in above.

The stones had fallen on the small trench as it crossed the chamber, and they have been laborously moved so that the ever increasing flow of water in the carved gutter is not blocked. At the west end of the room there is a wooden door, no more than seven years old. The door is crude but tightly joined and stout, and hinged on the other side. The small trench runs beneath the door, as if the passage continues on the other side. A soft draft comes from under the door, smelling mildly of dung.

Signs of life beyond the door are unmistakeable.

_[For more of the adventure, visit Grandpa Zero's web site.]_


End file.
